Detective Fiction, Thrillers, Women Detectives - Fiction, Police Stories, Occupations - Fiction

A Clinic for Murder

Name: A Clinic for Murder
Author: Marsha Landreth
ISBN: 9780802732415

by Marsha Landreth

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Overview

Samantha Turner needed the break from her medical duties in Sheridan, Wyoming. She also needed the continuing education credit certificates the medical examiners conference in San Diego would earn. Now, if she could only get her mind off that morning sickness that seemed to strike at any time of day... In this case, the cure is worse than the disease: In the middle of one of the lectures, a doctor falls over dead, and Sam has seen enough to know that there is something unnatural about it, a feeling her late husband's son, Derek, seems to share. Of course, he's willing to share anything with Sam, and if he's around, he can protect her - a protection she'd just as soon do without. And there's the fact that seeing Derek reminds her of her morning sickness - for a number of obvious reasons. As Sam asks about the doctor's death, more questions crop up. There's an abortion clinic and a less-than-grieving widow; there's a firebombing and a bomb aboard the plane that should be bringing her home. Painstakingly and sometimes painfully putting the pieces together, Samantha Turner discovers what a cabal of doctors has created - and finds that a honeymoon cruise to the Caribbean is not necessarily what the doctor ordered.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Readers who missed Dr. Sam Turner's debut in The Holiday Murders will have a hard time piecing together this sequel. Widowed for seven years, Samantha Turner is a Wyoming bison rancher and a medical examiner. Here she is also pregnant, unmarried and whiny. At a professional conference in San Diego, Dr. Doyle Smith collapses. Sam, rushing to his aid, hears him whisper ``murder'' and ``letter in safe'' before he dies. Checking out Smith's hotel room, Sam finds it has been ransacked. Soon she is arrested. Derek Turner, a CIA agent who is her late husband's son and also possibly the father of her child, turns up to spring her from jail and coax her into marriage. Sam continues her haphazard search into Smith's death, barely escaping a plane bombing on her return to Wyoming. A visit to Smith's widow in Denver is followed by a trip to a medical facility in the Caribbean which is linked to a bombed Los Angeles abortion clinic. The occasional inclusion of intriguing medical details fails to save this jumbled story, which relies way too heavily on circumstance. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Landreth's murder victims get lost in myriad soap-opera side effects when Sheridan, Wyoming's pregnant medical examiner, Dr. Samantha Turner, suspects murder in the sudden death of a conventioning cohort. Caught snooping, Turner spends the night in jail, but husband-to-be Derek, a spy of some sort (and son of her previous husband), rescues her. The two embark on an unpolished investigative journey fraught with erratic prose, confusing subplots, and ubiquitous morning sickness. Medical terms salted here and there leaden an already humorless effort. Pass.